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March 11, 2008

huh

Mac user puts faith in Apple / Time Machine to truly awesome use

Posted Mar. 11, ’08, 3:14 PM PT by David Dahlquist
Category | Apple » Huh?

time machine.jpgMike Solomon, a New York City based graphic designer, has put his Mac and Time Machine to innovative use. When faced with the issue of editing a project that required 20 gigs of space on his hard drive, which had but 10 gigs of space remaining, he put his faith in Apple on the line:

So what did I do? I did what any Mac user would do - I deleted my entire iTunes music folder. It cleared up about 65 gigs of space, and I was able to edit the video and all was well. Then when I got back home I restored all the files with Time Machine, which had automatically backed everything up.

I’d be pretty darn nervous about deleting 65 gigs of music without manually backing everything up on a hard drive, but it’s like they say: put your faith in Apple, and the rest will take care of itself…or something like that.

Mike: you’re the man now, dog!


8 Comments

nwmike said:

Why didn't he just backup his music to DVD? It would only have taken 8-9 DL discs...just kidding.

Wow, that is kinda scary. Glad it worked out for him!

March 11, 2008 6:26 PM
Toki-chan said:

I've done it with thirty... though I just have backed up double on a partitioned hardrive (not using Time machine), so that might be a little more safe than that guy. But I swear I always have to dump that stuff when I'm editing a movie. It's so annoying how big DV files are.

March 11, 2008 7:20 PM
Dave-O said:

Having recently gone through the ordeal of restoring a file from backup on my PC at work, I have to say that Time Machine has an excellent interface. On the PC it was about the most horrific interface I could imagine.

March 11, 2008 10:43 PM
Tony said:

Well I guess that apple has thought about this because there are a lot of macs out there with internal disk that the personal user end cannot access to it and most Imac are not for your novice home user to open up and change a hardrive because it decided to died on you so what a great way to make great back up add it into your fantastic most advance OS wooo hooo mac your the mac dog Jobs.

March 11, 2008 11:58 PM
krye said:

I did the same thing with my 30 Gig iPhoto library. Everything worked out great.

March 12, 2008 5:14 AM
Goobimama said:

What an idiot. Why not just delete 10-20Gigs worth of music?

Though I should also say that Time machine has saved my skin a couple of times now. May not be really important stuff, but getting that occasional document back is a great relief. Now I'm waiting for my mac HD to crash so I can restore it with TM...

March 12, 2008 5:52 AM
fletcher Author Profile Page said:

I've become very nervous about Time Machine. I've been backing up my MacBook since December onto a hard drive connected to a network store. Time Machine creates a sparseimage on the destination hard drive for my machine.

That sparseimage has gone bad and will no longer mount. This means that 300 GB of backups are trapped within it with no apparent means of recovery. If I can't figure out how to fix that disk image then I need to start backing up again from scratch and I lose all that history.

I realize that a failure of the backup hard drive itself would have the same effect, but losing the disk image in just three months has made me reconsider whether Time Machine over the network is a valid backup option at all. A damaged backup with no option for recovery is not any better than no backup at all.

I have relied on a SuperDuper! clone for the purpose described in the original blog post on occasion. But, I doubt I would ever rely on Time Machine for that purpose.

March 12, 2008 8:29 AM
Goobimama said:

@fletcher: Wait a minute. Are you using FileVault on your account? Cause my TM backup is just a mere folder with all of them files in it.

March 12, 2008 11:17 AM

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